December 20th, 2011· For rare cases where the program cannot figure out the number of cores and hyperthreading, the NumPhysicalCores option may help. See undoc.txt.
· Faster FFT implementations are now selected for Core 2 CPUs with 1MB L2 cache or less (marketed under the Celeron and Pentium label).
· New, slightly higher, trial factoring breakeven points.
April 9th, 2011· For rare cases where the program cannot figure out the number of cores and hyperthreading, the NumPhysicalCores option may help. See undoc.txt.
· Faster FFT implementations are now selected for Core 2 CPUs with 1MB L2 cache or less (marketed under the Celeron and Pentium label).
· New, slightly higher, trial factoring breakeven points.
April 9th, 2011· Minor bug fixes.
Starting in build 2, P-1 work will display the chance of finding a factor. The worktodo.txt line must include how_far_factored using the new syntax:
· Pminus1=k,b,n,c,B1,B2[,how_far_factored][,B2_start][,"factors"]
· Starting with build 3, at startup the program tries to determine which hyperthreaded logical CPUs comprise one physical CPU. The previous version's AffinityScramble setting is no longer supported!
April 9th, 2011· The 64-bit version supports 64 threads (up from 32).
· Each on-screen window can now scroll back 1000 lines of output.
· ECM time estimates improved. ECM may be a smidge faster.
April 9th, 2011· A few crash bugs were fixed that affected only some CPU architectures and some FFT lengths. Other minor bugs were fixed.
April 9th, 2011· Faster FFTs for most SSE2-capable CPU architectures.
· More FFT lengths supported.
· Some of the new, faster FFTs don't let us do as much error checking on each iteration. If you don't want to lose this error checking, choose "SUM(INPUTS) error checking" from the Options menu. This will slow down your tests by about 2-5%.
· When a possible hardware error occurs during a test, the error message would likely scroll off the screen unnoticed. Now, all future progress updates to the screen will be followed by a message containing a count of the errors that have occurred during the test.
· Worker Windows now stagger their starts. This improves timings for some CPUs and operating systems.
April 9th, 2011· PRP of k*b^n+c where b > 2 will be faster in many cases.
· Zero-padded FFTs are about 3-4% faster. These FFTs are used in projects like SeventeenOrBust.
April 9th, 2011· A bug that caused pfactor save file names to begin with the letter p was fixed. It now uses m like all other P-1 efforts. Old save file names are automatically upgraded.
· Prime95 now recovers gracefully from more out-of-memory conditions when doing ECM or P-1.
· We now do P-1 factoring one bit level before the trial factoring limit. The previous version started P-1 two bit levels before the trial factoring limit.
April 9th, 2011· Performance increases for the 64-bit version by taking advantage of the eight extra SSE2 registers. The 32-bit version may also be a bit faster by taking advantage of the Core 2 architecture. The FFT code was originally optimized for the Pentium 4 where instructions like "movapd reg,reg" take 6 clocks and should be avoided, whereas on Core 2 the same instruction uses just 1 clock cycle and improves scheduling.
The 32-bit version may be slightly faster or slower on the Pentium 4, but not enough to worry about. Preliminary benchmarks indicate:
· 32-bit Pentium 4: between 2% slower and 1% faster
· 32-bit Core 2: between 2% and 6% faster
· 64-bit Pentium 4: between 2% and 4% faster
· 64-bit Core 2: between 10% and 13% faster
· 64-bit Core i7: between 7% and 12% faster
· 64-bit Phenom: between 10% and 13% faster
· AMD64: between 1% slower and 1% faster
· Intermediate save files were overhauled. Trial factoring, P-1, and ECM now support multiple save files. The backup save file uses a .bu extension. While a new save file is being written a .write extension is used and renamed when successfully written (thus, briefly there are 3 save files). NOTE #1: LL save files no longer use an initial letter of q and r. The program will automatically use these obsolete files if necessary and delete them when no longer needed. NOTE #2: ECM and P-1 save files on k*2^n+1 no longer use file names beginning with d and l.
· The -An command line argument no longer appends an extension to save file names. NOTE #3: The client now supports keeping three save files.
· Miscellaneous minor bug fixes.
November 24th, 2008· Bug fixed in smart affinity on hyperthreaded CPUs
· Bug fixed in setting a thread priority other than 1
· Off-by-one-bit bug fixed in the benchmarking of trial factoring
June 19th, 2007· A bug that caused the torture test to hang on 256K FFTs on SSE2 machines with 128K of L2 cache was fixed.
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